Perfectly Frank

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-gehry-retrospective-pompidou-20141019-colum.html#page=1

Centre Georges Pompidou
Paris France
pictify.com

Bon jour tout le monde:

Hello everyone, as you might have guessed we are moving on from climate change to a Frank Gehry retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in paris, France.  This blog's favorite architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne was recently dispatched by the Los Angeles Times to review the exhibit on the "City of Angels's" best-known architect.  Mr. Hawthorne's review titled, "Comprehensive 'Gehry retrospective draws a sociological blank," sums up the retrospective as "...an impeccable vacuum.  The curators have worked strenuously, if invisibly, to keep at bay the full range of issues that have given the rest of the architecture a full-on identity crisis in the last decade or so."  The exhibition is drawing architecture fans and the curious, all eager to be a part of and peer into the fertile imagination of Frank Gehry.

Frank Gehry
Exhibition portrait
inexhibit.com

On the Centre Pompidou website, the museum writes, Le nom de Frank Gehry incarne á lui seul l'image de l'architecture contemporaine.  Mondialement reconnu por des project qui ont aujourd'hui valeur d'icône, son œuvre a révolutionné l'esthétique de l'architecture... (http://www.centrepompidou.fr)  Basically translated into English, "The name Frank Gehry represents the singular image of contemporary architecture.  Globally recognized for his projects,  today he is considered an icon and his work revolutionized architectural esthetics.  Despite this hallowed description, Mr. Hawthorne reports, "The curators cast Gehry in a well-worn mold: as one of the Great Men of contemporary architecture, a lone creative genius who has navigated a path from teenage Canadian immigrant in postwar Los Angeles to global superstar, churning out unorthodox houses, museums and concert halls all the while."

Frank Gehry models on display
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"Well-worn mold: as one of the Great Men of contemporary architecture?"  Mr. Hawthorne makes Mr. Gehry sound like some molten material (concrete, a Gehry favorite, perhaps) poured into a well-used mold, allowed to set, and out comes a copy of the idealized Great Man of contemporary architecture.  Please.  If you want to ponder his greatness, then consider this Mr. Gehry greatness comes from the fact that he, more than any architect, signifies one side of the battles that have reshaped architectural practice over the last ten years.  Combat began "...with a dispute over how architecture is produced; whether it is fundamentally a collaborative or personal art."  Mr. Hawthorne used the magic word, "art."  Architecture is an art form the straddles the line between fine and technical art.  One one side is we have the importance of form-making battling "the value of the iconic, photogenic project in architecture" and on the other side is a strategy that is politically, socially, and environmentally engaged.

Frederick R. Weisman Art and Teaching Museum, model
Photography by Don F. Wong
departures.com

The retrospective coincides with the recent opening of the Louis Vuitton Foundation Contemporary Art Museum in Paris.  The building is the latest reminder that Mr. Gehry is still very able to create architecture that falls into the category of iconic, photogenic projects.  Humanism is the essence of Frank Gehry's work which insulates him from running after a succession of vanity pieces.  On a side note, Mr. Gehry recently spoke to a gaggle of Spanish journalists who asked him to respond to criticism of his own style.  Mr. Gehry answered by giving the writers a rude gesture and declaring "Let me tell you one thing.  In the world we live in, 98 per cent of what gets built and designed today is pure shit."  Excuse the language and let me amend that to pure egotistical s__t. (http://www.dezeen.com)

Louis Vuitton Foundation Museum
Paris, France
businessweek.com

The Louis Vuitton Foundation Museum for Contemporary Art for Louis Vuitton Moet-Hennesy Chairman Bernard Arnault is, by Christopher Hawthorne's estimation "...one of his firm's finest buildings," on par with the Walt Disney Concert Hall.  Mr. Hawthorne is seems to be convinced, at least for the moment, "that architecture's single highest calling, even in 2014, is to produce rooms that achieve a surprising kind of equilibrium and proportion without resorting to boxy and predictable geometry."  Even at this architecture 101 skill, Mr. Gehry is far more accomplished than his critics care to admit.  Mr. Hawthorne also concurs with the Centre Pompidou curators, who have dedicated a whole section of the retrospective to urbanism in Mr. Gehry's work that his eponymous firm is underrated in it ability understand and respond to urban context.

Close up of the Louis Vuitton Foundation Museum
archrecord.construction.com

Christopher Hawthorne concides, "But the truth is that the battle over the profession and its priorities is far from settled or clear-cut.  In fact it continues actively to reorder not just architectural practice but urban planning, criticism and other related fields."  He cites the Vuitton building as an excellent example, calling it "...both a spectacular work of architecture and a challenge, thanks to the deal Arnault managed to strike to build in the middle of the Bois de Boulogne, to a deeply held set of beliefs in France about communal civic culture."  If one were to read it at the superficial level, one would miss the full range in which architecture operates.

Model of the architect's house in Santa Monica, Ca
Frank Gehry
unlockparis.com

Typically of retrospectives, the curators at the Centre Pompidou divided the architect's career into six chronological phases, beginning with his early work at the office of Victor Gruen.  The drab stucco boxes that characterized the early years, exemplified by the Danziger Studio (1964) on Melrose Avenue, begin to transform into more abstract forms that Mr. Hawthorne likens to the still lives of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi.

The exhibit hinges on a pair of projects that suggest a completely new, fluid, and digitally enabled architecture.  The Vitra Design Museum in Germany and the never built Lewis Residence in Cleveland, Ohio present Mr. Gehry's mounting frustrations with traditional building and design methodology. The shift to digitally enabled architecture would come full fruition in the spectacular Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (1997) and the Disney Concert Hall (2003) in Los Angeles.  In addition to a room dedicated to the firm's use of computational architecture then finishes with a look at works in progress.

Guggenheim Museum
Frank Gehry
Bilbao, Spain
en.wikipedia.org

The retrospective is composed of carefully selected framing drawing varied in their technique and approach.  Expressing mock surprise, Mr. Hawthorne reports, "they are the big surprise of the show-along with models mounted on simple white pedestals and video screens  showing a rotating group of projects." There is a wall dedicated to seventies era photographs by Frank Gehry of industrial buildings and warehouses that bring to mind the work of Ed Russcha, Bernd and Hilla Becher; a small number of projects from 1962 when the architect was having his Paris moment working for architect Andre Remondet and planner Robert Auzelle.

Christopher Hawthorne takes issue with the fact that the Gehry Retrospectives misses the opportunity to showcase how Frank Gehry works.  The exhibit leaves out the extra-large models used by his firm as a main feature of the design process.  More succinctly, there is no information about the role played by key partners Greg Walsh, Edwin Chan, Meaghan Lloyd, Craig Webb.  Also not presented is Mr. Gehry's complex relationship with Los Angeles, the uncertain fate of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, and the political uproar caused by his plan to put over a dozen buildings and a basketball arena in Brooklyn, and the controversy over labor conditions at the Guggenheim satellite museum, scheduled to be completed in 2017, in Abu Dhabi.  Regarding this last issue, Mr. Gehry has employed a human-rights to monitor working conditions at the Abu Dhabi site.

The Vitra Design Museum
Frank Gehry
Weil am Rhein, Germany
en.wikipedia.org

Christopher Hawthorne questions whether or not Mr. Gehry's working methods, his partners, or his more controversial projects are appropriate architectural or curatorial subjects.  Should they be relegated to exhibition catalogs or placed in a separate room? Yours truly thinks that the Centre Pompidou curators wanted to focus more on the heroic aspects of Frank Gehry's work, leaving out the messiness of the day-to-day aspects (far more interesting) including the architect's design methodology or his relationships with his partners.

Museums are continuing to resuscitate architecture and design exhibition by insisting that they including social, economic, and political components.  One example is the Museum of Modern Art in New York has recently mounted a series of design and architecture exhibition, such as "Conceptions of Space: Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Architecture," which specifically have a political and social agenda.  (http://www.moma.org)  An increasing number of curators: Ruth Estevez, Joseph Grimes, Henry Urbach, and the Belgian collective Rotor have enlarged the scope of their shows to present similar themes.

The Dancing House
Frank Gehry
Prague, Czech Republic
en.visitparisregion.com

Centre Pompidou has gently insulated the Gehry exhibit from these emerging design strategies.  Mr. Hawthorne expresses a lack of astonishment, "To a certain extent that's no surprise.  Monographic shows of this king often tiptoe around touchy subjects, edging in the worst cases toward hagiography."  According to the museum curators, Mr. Gehry worked closely with Centre Pompidou on the exhibit design.  Thus we can infer that Mr. Gehry himself deliberately omitted any references to social and political design strategies as well as the messiness of quotidian.

However, Mr. Hawthorne suggests that there are ways to address the big issues without falling short on the architecture, as other curator have managed to accomplish. What differentiates architecture from the fine arts-i.e. painting and sculpture-is architecture is not experienced hanging on a wall or behind a vitrine. Architecture interacts in and with the real world.  What distinguishes Frank Gehry's work from the vanity projects is that Mr. Gehry manages to negotiate this synergy better than the majority of his contemporaries.  All of this leaves the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with a problem.  The Gehry retrospective is schedule to come to LACMA in September 2015 and helming the exhibit is senior curator and head of modern art Stephanie Barron, which gives Mr. Hawthorne reason for optimism.

Walt Disney Concert Hall
Frank Gehry
Los Angeles, California
latimes.com

Why is Christopher Hawthorne sounding a note of optimism over the pending arrival of the Gehry retrospective?  "The museum is hardly in a position, though, to assess Gehry's work at a critical remove. The architect often works with Barron to design exhibitions for the museum."  In other words, Mr. Hawthorne hopes that LACMA will present a more critical exhibition of Frank Gehry's oeuvre, not hagiography such the one at Centre Pompidou. Further, museum director Michael Govan has been vocal about hiring Mr. Gehry to design a new tower on property owned by the museum, just south of Wilshire Boulevard.  Yours truly has a suggestion, fire Peter Zumthor as the architect of the new LACMA and hire Mr. Gehry.  Mr. Govan is also expressed interest in acquiring the Gehry archives which could serve as an anchor for planned architecture and design galleries at the base of the tower.

Like Christopher Hawthorne, yours truly is also glad to hear that Michael Govan is bring the Gehry retrospective to his museum.  However, it remains to be seen how the story of Frank Gehry, architectwill be told without ignoring the complicated elements of his work.